THE UNITY OF GENESIS. 



337 



hi the Southern kingdom, the later due to a man or a school 

 belonging to the Northern kingdom. How little of his works 

 and life was recorded in these two documents ! Especially one 

 of the most glorious episodes of Moses' life — the crossing of the 

 Red Sea — is briefly mentioned, while it is given with most 

 details in the post-exilian books. If the tradition of the Israel- 

 ites had not preserved more than what there is in J. and E., 

 certainly it could not give them the idea of one of those com- 

 manding heroes whose memory is a ruling power in a nation. 



And how was this redactor to write his book with the definite 

 plan he had in view ; where was he to get his material ? If he 

 took the Priestly Code as his framework, he found there a 

 tendency quite different from his, a spirit of legalism and insti- 

 tutionalism carried so far, as Professor Skinner says, " that it 

 would have cut away the most precious and edifying narratives 

 of the past, if the religious feeling of post-exilian Judaism had 

 not compelled the author to combine such discordant elements/' 



As for the Jahvist and the Elohist, distant in place and in 

 time, in some parts they are parallel, but their tendencies are 

 not the same. The beginning of Genesis is supposed to show 

 that they had not the same conception of divinity, since they 

 did not call it by the same name. Nothing is known of the 

 extent of their books, of the purpose for which they were 

 written, of the way in which the Elohist could be preserved 

 after the Northern kingdom had disappeared and had been 

 replaced by the Samaritans. 



Even admitting that the redactor filled a quantity of gaps, 

 and, in order to cement together all these loose fragments, that 

 he put in a great deal of matter for which he is responsible, we 

 cannot admit that a book like Genesis, with a plan so clear, so 

 definite, so admirably worked out from beginning to end, can be 

 derived from a quantity of fragments put together, the origin of 

 which is so different in time and in circumstances. Genesis is 

 the work of one author, and this author, as we shall see, could 

 only be Moses. 



I cannot revert here to the arguments which I adduced 

 before in a book devoted to show that Moses did not write in 

 Hebrew*. Everyone agrees that he did not use the characters 

 called square Hebrew, which are those of our Bibles. This 

 alphabet is, perhaps, a little earlier than the Christian era, but 

 certainly not much older. But he did not use even the Hebrew 

 language. In his time Hebrew was not a literary language : 

 it may have been the dialect which the Hebrews had brought 

 to Egypt from Canaan, but it was not the language of books. 



